Thank you to our witnesses for appearing.
Ms. Murdoch, I want to talk about dredging. Although the flood devastation in the Fraser Valley was immense, it could have been so many times worse had the Fraser dikes been breached by this atmospheric event.
Your presentation addressed the steps that will be taken to restore and protect fish habitat, effectively after the fact. The focus of the study is actually “risks flood control/mitigation systems...pose to wild salmon runs”. The Fraser River dikes run all the way from Hope down to Richmond, and if they were breached, the devastation would be many orders of magnitude greater. It behooves us as decision-makers to turn our minds to how we harden our infrastructure—in other words, to our diking and drainage systems.
One of the problems in the Fraser River—and if you speak to the mayor of Abbotsford he'll confirm this—is that the current of the Fraser River is being redirected. Sandbars are building up, redirecting the currents up against the dikes themselves, undermining them. I believe the term that's used is “avulsion”. In any event, the integrity of those dikes, which are many decades old, is being eroded. I believe that DFO and levels of government across Canada are going to have to put their minds to how to protect our communities against these events that will become more frequent.
To get to the dredging issue, obviously DFO is deeply implicated in the dredging of rivers.
Have you turned your mind to the possibility of increasing the dredging to ensure that the flow of the river doesn't further undermine the integrity of the dikes?